Note: This page is about KDE 4. It isn't applicable for KDE 3 development.

This page focuses on building KDE trunk on FreeBSD. For building and using stable KDE releases on FreeBSD, you should use the ports collection -- see the FreeBSD Wiki for more information.

Required Ports

devel/boost-python (for pimlibs)

devel/cmake

devel/dbus

devel/git

devel/subversion

graphics/libungif (for libs)

misc/shared-mime-info (for libs)

multimedia/libxine (for base-or config with KDE4_DISABLE_MULTIMEDIA)

security/gpgme (for pimlibs)

textproc/libxslt

textproc/redland (for support/soprano)

x11/xorg

x11-toolkits/shared-desktop-ontologies

Differences from the normal build process

The page on building KDE4 trunk makes a few assumptions about your environment. Note that FreeBSD's dbus and cmake ports will work (so those sections can be skipped).

Sometimes, building with make can fail on some modules. You should try using gmake instead.

Using kdesrc-build

The kdesrc-build script can be used on FreeBSD. Note that if there are errors building qt-copy or libs, look at the issues below and fix them, then continue the build using kdesrc-build.

Errors compiling qt-copy

My build of qt-copy is failing when I have Qt4 from ports installed.

For some reason, the configure system will sometimes put -I/usr/local/include (which contains the ports version of qt4 headers) into the general CXXFLAGS variable. Note that there is an INCPATH variable for these include paths which should also contain -I/usr/local/include. The difference is in the compile line; CXXFLAGS's appears first, whereas the paths in INCPATH are ordered properly such that the local (current build) headers are checked first. You need to go into the directory where the build is failing (use the previous lines before the error message), and open the Makefile. You should see the the -I/usr/local/include line in the CXXFLAGS line, and you can safetly remove it IF there is a -I/usr/local/include line in INCPATH.
This seems to usually happen in build_dir/qt-copy/src/plugins/sqldrivers/psql/Makefile

My build of qt-copy is failing in qatomic_x86_64.h on my 64bit system.

This is a GCC3 issue with 64-bit systems, so FreeBSD 7.x and later shouldn't be affected.

See Trolltech's bugzilla for a description of this problem. It's an issue with gcc3 and 64bit systems, with a particular optimization. Possible solutions described there include "To work around this bug, recompile qstylesheetstyle.cpp with removing -O2, or add the -fno-gcse compiler option."

Errors compiling kdesupport

System-wide Qt4 keeps being found instead of qt-copy

Sometimes, /usr/local/bin/qmake-qt4 insists on being found instead of qt-copy's qmake, which in turn makes cmake use the system-wide Qt during compilation. If everything else fails, you can pass -DQT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE=/your/path/qmake to cmake.

Cannot link to polkit-dbus

If all polkit-related ports are correctly installed and the error persists, you most likely need to export LIBRARY_PATH and include /usr/local/lib in it.